1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure generally relate to device interfaces, and more particularly, to a bridge for high-speed interfaces.
2. Related Art
Host devices, such as personal computers, laptop computers, and other types of devices, may support a variety of different interfaces. Such interfaces may include, for example, Universal Serial Bus (USB) interfaces, Peripheral Component Interfaces (PCI), PCI Express (PCIe) interfaces, and other interfaces. Also, such interfaces may be implemented in accordance with substantially different protocols, clocking schemes, physical connectors, and other differences. As a result, host devices are often required to be outfitted with large numbers of different types of interfaces which may not interoperate well with each other.
Existing interface implementations may require large numbers of reference clocks and/or phase lock loop (PLL) circuits to facilitate synchronization of the various transmit and receive data streams provided by multiple interfaces. The implementation costs and power consumption of such reference clocks (e.g., reference clocks implemented with costly oscillators, such as crystal oscillators, that are used to generate reference clock signals) and PLL circuits can often render such designs impractical.
It is often difficult for host device manufacturers to contemplate all of the types of interfaces that a user may require in a host device. Also, the small form factor of certain host devices such as laptops may limit the number of interfaces that may be provided on a host device. As a result, users are often required to add additional interfaces to host devices.
In particular, laptop users may employ docking stations or port replicators to provide expandability and convenience for working at a desk. Unfortunately, docking stations typically require a proprietary high-speed connector to provide high-performance access to functions such as hard drives, displays, and network adapters. Thus, docking stations are often costly to implement due to the various types of proprietary connectors that typically must be used to support high throughput.
Port replicators generally use a relatively low speed standard peripheral interface to attach low performance functions such as serial ports, audio devices, and low-speed network adapters. Nevertheless, despite their lower cost, port replicators are typically limited in performance and cannot support high speed communications required by high performance peripheral devices. Accordingly, there is a need for a new approach to providing interface compatibility to host devices.